gislation
inspire the citizen with a sense of security. In order to prevent misuse of
the supreme power, the different authorities in the state must be divided
so that they shall hold one another in check. In particular Montesquieu
demands for the judicial power absolute independence of the executive power
(which Locke had termed the federative) as well as of the legislative
power. The last belongs to parliament, which includes in its two houses an
aristocratic and a democratic element.

Voltaire[1] (1694-1778)--he himself had made this anagram from his name,
Arouet l(e) j(eune)--seemed by his many-sided receptivity almost made to be
the interpreter of English ideas; in the words of Windelband, he "combines
Newton's mechanical philosophy of nature, Locke's noetical empiricism, and
Shaftesbury's moral philosophy under the deistic point of view." The
same qualities which made him the first journalist, enabled him to free
philosophy from its scholastic garb, and, by concentrating it on the
problems which press most upon the lay mind (God, freedom, immortality),
to make it a living force among the people. His superficiality, as Erdmann
acutely remarks, was his strength. True religion, so reason teaches us,
consists in loving God and in being just and forbearing to our fellow-men
as to our brothers; morality is so natural and necessary that it is no
wonder that all philosophers since Zoroaster have inculcated the same
principles. The less of dogma the better the religion; atheism is not
so bad as superstition, which teaches men to commit crimes with an easy
conscience. He considered it the chief mission of his life to destroy these
two miserable errors. He endeavored to controvert atheism by rational
arguments, while with passionate hatred and contemptuous wit he attacked
positive Christianity and his persecutors, the priesthood. The existence
of God is for him not merely a moral postulate, but a result of scientific
reasoning. One of his famous sayings was: "If God did not exist it would be
necessary to invent him; but all nature cries out to us that he exists." He
defends immortality in spite of theoretical difficulties, because of its
practical necessity; his attitude toward the freedom of the will, which
he had energetically defended in the beginning, grows constantly more
skeptical with increasing age. His position in regard to the question
of evil experiences a similar change--the Lisbon earthquake made him an
opponent